Are you an entrepreneur interested in creating new business models on mobile?

Then we want to hear from you. In association with the Nike Foundation, Vodafone, AITI-KACE and the British Council, HACCRA is a one-day hack day and ideation seminar looking to find the most exciting new ideas that can be built to prototype then production.

The session will include:

Visual prototyping

Wire-framing

Powerful ideation techniques

Business model generation

Competitive analysis

Customer profiling

The session is led by Andrew Missingham, a UK-based entrepreneur and management consultant whose clients include Nike Inc. the BBC, Bacardi, the Royal Academy of Arts, UK Music and Sony.

The session will take place at AITI-KACE (Kofi Annan ICT Centre), starting at 8am sharp. Free entry (subject to capacity). Lunch and coffee will be provided.

Vodafone have generously provided prizes for all participants, and a special prize for the most entrepreneurial, innovative contributor BUT HURRY.

“I don’t care how esoteric it is, but it’s got to be terrific,” he said. “Not this ‘you-can’t-hear-it-and-it’s-terribly-performed-but-it’s-really-very-interesting-because-it’s-the-only-winkle-gathering-song-to-come-out-of-southeastern-Sussex’ attitude.”

Awesome. I concur – bring out the terrific music now please! And if it’s original, so much the better.

John Storm Roberts, an English-born writer, record producer and independent scholar whose work explored the rich, varied and often surprising ways in which the popular music of Africa and Latin America informed that of the United States, died on Nov. 29 in Kingston, N.Y. He was 73 and lived in Kingston.

The cause was complications of a blood clot, his wife, Anne Needham, said.

Long before the term was bandied about, Mr. Roberts was listening to, seeking out and reporting on what is now called world music. He wrote several seminal books on the subject for a general readership, most notably “Black Music of Two Worlds” (Praeger, 1972) and “The Latin Tinge: The Impact of Latin American Music on the United States” (Oxford University, 1979).

“Black Music of Two Worlds” examines the cross-pollination — in both directions — between Africa and the Americas, from the influence of African music on jazz, blues, salsa and samba to the popularity in Nigeria and Zaire of American artists like James Brown and Jimi Hendrix.

In writing the book, Mr. Roberts sought to connect a diffuse web of existing studies by ethnomusicologists. The studies typically appraised local musical traditions while ignoring the reach of Africa as a whole.

“It was like a landscape with a large number of artesian wells, and nothing linking them,” he told The New York Times in 1992. “And I conceived of ‘Black Music of Two Worlds’ being more like canals joining.”

“The Latin Tinge,” Mr. Roberts trained his ear on the influence of musical forms like tango, rumba, mambo and salsa on a wide range of American pop styles, among them ragtime, Tin Pan Alley, rhythm and blues, jazz, country and rock.

Reviewing the book in The New York Times Book Review, Robert Palmer called it a “painstaking, pioneering” work, adding: “ ‘The Latin Tinge’ is an important addition to the literature of American music.”

John Anthony Storm Roberts was born in London on Feb. 24, 1936. His father, an accountant who often traveled abroad on business, brought him records that were then scarcely available in England: jazz and blues from the United States, Brazilian music by way of Portugal and much else. By the time he was in his early teens, John was irretrievably mesmerized by the sounds that leapt from his turntable.

A polyglot who came to speak more than half a dozen languages, including Swahili, Mr. Roberts received a bachelor’s degree in modern languages from Oxford University. In the mid-1960s he spent several years in Kenya as a reporter and editor on The East African Standard, a regional newspaper. Returning to London, he was a radio producer with the BBC World Service.

Mr. Roberts moved to the United States in 1970, becoming an editor on the periodical Africa Report. He was later a freelance journalist, contributing articles on world music to The Village Voice and other publications.

In the early 1980s, Mr. Roberts and Ms. Needham started Original Music, a mail-order company that distributed world-music books and records. In those pre-Internet days, Americans outside big cities found these almost as hard to come by as young Mr. Roberts had in postwar England.

In business for nearly two decades, Original Music also released many well-received albums of its own. Among them are “The Sound of Kinshasa,” featuring Zairian guitar music; “Africa Dances,” an anthology of music from more than a dozen countries; and “Songs the Swahili Sing,” devoted to the music of Kenya, an aural kaleidoscope of African, Arab and Indian sounds.

Mr. Roberts’s first marriage, to Jane Lloyd, ended in divorce. Besides Ms. Needham, whom he married in 1981, he is survived by two children from his first marriage, Stephen and Alice Roberts; three stepchildren, Melissa, Elizabeth and Stephen Keiper; two grandchildren; and three step-grandchildren.

His other books include “Latin Jazz: The First of the Fusions, 1880s to Today” (Schirmer, 1999) and “A Land Full of People: Life in Kenya Today” (Praeger, 1968).

In choosing what to release on the Original Music label, Mr. Roberts did not disdain modern, popular numbers: by his lights, a song simply had to be good. This distinguished him from musicological purists who, in ceaseless quest for the authentic, recorded only material seemingly untouched by modernity.

In an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 1987, Mr. Roberts illuminated his selection process.

“I don’t care how esoteric it is, but it’s got to be terrific,” he said. “Not this ‘you-can’t-hear-it-and-it’s-terribly-performed-but-it’s-really-very-interesting-because-it’s-the-only-winkle-gathering-song-to-come-out-of-southeastern-Sussex’ attitude.”

I received the crushing news on Saturday morning that Ramata Diakite had passed on Friday night (October 30, 2009) at the age of 35. I’ll be updating this post as I get further information – my thoughts are kind of scattered, and I’m trying to sort out the best way to get news out and give proper remembrance for this wonderful human.

I first met Ramata in the apartment of good friend Mamadou Sidibe (n’goni player) in Brooklyn. Of course I knew who she was from living in Mali, and hearing her music on the radio. At that point, I was working with Madou and some other Malian artists to book shows, distribute music, and other management activity. But no one quite on the level of an artist like Ramata. Despite knowing this, she asked me a few weeks after meeting me to manage her. I declined, worrying I couldn’t do her career justice.

We kept in touch over the years directly and through Madou. I arranged for her to be part of the “1 Giant Leap” follow-up film “What About Me”. She has a beautiful contribution which has appeared on the “What About Me” TV series in the UK.

One of the creators of 1GL just sent me this, his journal entry from when he met Ramata:

4/12/04 … “Eric[h] gave me Ramata’s Cd and I listened to it in the lift up to my room. It sounded great, very powerful. When she arrived I played her track 29 and she just burst into it straight away and it sounded great. I burnt her a CD and said we’d be at her place in the morning. Off she popped and we did indeed turn up the following day. She lived south of the Niger in a really weird but quite affluent area. Its basically a building site with half of the houses finished and lived in. Her house was lovely, a small courtyard where we recorded the vocal and once again the splendid 70’s styling that is still huge in Mali. The tea here has set me loose from my energy holes and now the coffee is really doing the business. It’ll have to stop you know! Ramata rocked and I had a great vibe with her husband who was totally knocked out when I gave him a set of radio headphones to wear. I noticed between takes that he had his turned to 10 (the way I do) which is VERY loud. We did a second take on the roof which was great with a view across loads of other houses. By the end of the take all the roofs had people watching and about 20 people had gathered outside in the street below and they all burst into applause, it was great….”

For more about this project, go here and click on “Mali” in the left bar. You’ll see some photos of Ramata from that shoot.

After a while, and a switch in her US label, she again asked me to manage her, and this time I agreed, and became her co-manager with Organic Music as the other management partner.

Over the past couple of years, we worked with her on conceptualizing and recording a more traditional album, which is yet to be released. We had hoped to have her in the US for a tour in 2010. . .

During the past year, she had been battling a chronic illness, and although she appeared to be getting better, she passed in Burkina Faso on Friday, October 30th. She had recently traveled to Burkina. Her body was brought back to Mali and buried there under the direction of the Malian Prime Minister.